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The journey of a thousand [carbon neutral :-) ] miles begins with one step.

A personal action that I have been doing more intentionally is to strictly use public transit for work commute. GHG emissions from single occupancy car use, feels really disheartening when you factor in the daily traffic volume across regions. Since our last session, as a personal action, I also spent some time to look into my commute carbon impact through a platform that I have at my work and thanks to the knowledge shared in our session, I now understand what it means when it says that by using transit, I have prevented ~12,500 pounds of CO2 over ~8800miles of commute so far.

As a systemic action, I plan to participate in the city's upcoming environmental services (9/3), and parks and community services commission (9/16) meetings and as a first step, have been reading the 2026-2030 Bellevue Sustainable Plan.

Iris Call to Action

I took the following actions to share this program and initiatives with my Service organization, reviewed state policies that apply to my properties in Ohio as well as Washington and purchased and installed energy efficient appliances and tools to control and monitor my energy consumption Share this program, specifically the Energy Smart Eastside with my service organizations: The Links, Incorporated and Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority. Identify areas that I can bring to both groups for their STEAM programs Review the State Policies for Washington and compare them with Ohio - leverage both policies for homes in Washington State and Ohio…

Week 1 homework

Individual action: bike everywhere if it's safe, otherwise use transit. This is also perfect for the upcoming Week Without Driving.Systemic action: individual actions will take you only so far, so I went and checked the voter's pamphlet for the upcoming elections to see if any candidate mentions climate change as an important problem in their statement, and I was very disappointed to find only one candidate, Jessica Forsythe for LD48; this is my district, and I only checked "my" candidates. Would be curious if somebody in another district found another candidate who takes climate change seriously.